On Wednesday 28 November 2007 12:40, Jon S. Berndt wrote: > This is very interesting: > > http://www.microsoft.com/esp/ > http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2216455,00.asp > > Jon
This _is_ interesting. FlightGear (and SimGear), as it (they) are, should be ok re patents because it (they) pre-date(s) MS-ESP. We might have to be careful about major re-designs or major new features though. Although we mostly view FG as a flight-simulator it is already much more than just a flight-simulator program. Just recently we've had a couple of ground vehicles added and ships have always been a feature, albeit undeveloped ones, but even so, various possible enhancements were discussed on the lists years ago. Personally, quite apart from converting the Ford GT40 model I did years ago, purely just for a 3D picture, into a usable ground vehicle, I've looked in to adapting FG for several other rolls, mostly centered around various navigation tasks (although I've also considered doing a pogo-stick). One of the ideas I had was for a Hiking/Trekking/Orientation Simulator. As FG more or less already uses a plugin scheme for FDMs it would be trivial to set up a simple 'human' FDM - heh - or even a complex 'human' FDM, including biological sub-systems i.e. fuel(food) processing, fatigue etc. Even making the existing terrain work better at low-level wouldn't be difficult - just a lot of work. For example, just by using aggressive LOD and a wide variety of different tree and plant (sub) models, it would be easy (but time-consuming) to simulate a walk through a forest or even most other types of terrain. Rockier types of terrain would be a little harder but once again, using aggressive LOD, it would be possible to implement a fractal terrain 'roughener'. Bearing in mind that at ground level you don't see such a wide area of terrain as you do when you're a couple, or even tens of thousands of feet, in the air, I don't think the rendering load would increase too much due to the greater complexity of the local terrain. There's obviously already support for navigation - magnetic, astro & also geo-feature recognition e.g. picking out terrain elevation features - ridges, valleys - and matching them to a map, so all that's needed to perform navigation tasks is a few new instruments :) Obvious, spin-offs/uses from that point would range from MMPORG games, via multi-player, to military ground-force training and simulation. Everything is, essentially, already there. If we could get the data, it would even be possible to go underwater and do submarines, and extend FG into a complete 'environment-simulator'. The troubling thing about MS-ESP is that it encroaches on our 'turf', it will be proprietary in format and it will be tied to the MS platforms and licencing. Hopefully though, it will be irrelevant to FG. LeeE ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
